Air France vs Ethiopian Airlines vs Kenya Airways: Best Airline for Connecting Through Africa

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Search for the best airline for connecting through Africa, and the underlying data delivers an uncomfortable answer before any airline name appears. 

According to a 2025 report by the International Air Transport Association, as reported by Airspace Africa, only 19% of routes between African cities offer direct flights. The rest of Africa’s air travellers connect somewhere, through Addis Ababa, through Nairobi, or through Paris- and which of those cities an airline routes a passenger through decides whether a journey across the continent takes six hours or sixteen hours.

Three airlines dominate that decision: Ethiopian Airlines, Kenya Airways, and Air France. Ethiopian Airlines wins this comparison, and not by a narrow margin. It has built the only network on the continent designed to move passengers between African cities rather than simply between Africa and Europe, a structural advantage that neither Kenya Airways’ unstable balance sheet nor Air France’s Paris-centred model can presently match. What follows explains why and where the other two carriers still hold real ground.

Ethiopian Airlines: Built for Connecting Through Africa, Not Just to It

Ethiopian Airlines flies to more African cities than any other carrier, connecting over 61 destinations on the continent from its hub at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport. That network sits on a financial base few African carriers can claim. 

According to the Ethiopian Monitor, Ethiopian Airlines Group reported revenue of $7.6 billion for the 2024/25 fiscal year, an 8% rise on the previous year, while carrying 19.1 million passengers. Six months into the following fiscal year, the airline had already booked $4.4 billion in revenue, a 14% year-on-year increase, while serving 145 international destinations and operating 170 aircraft across the group.

Group Chief Executive Officer Mesfin Tasew, speaking at a briefing in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, attributed the growth to network expansion and fleet investment, noting that the airline had “effectively implemented its planned activities” for the period. The business model behind that statement matters more than the quote itself. Ethiopian is wholly owned by Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, which has financed a hub-and-spoke strategy that smaller, partly privatised rivals struggle to match. It has extended that model through regional subsidiaries, including ASKY Airlines in Togo, Malawian Airlines, and the newly launched Air Congo, each designed to feed traffic back into Addis Ababa from corners of the continent that Ethiopian cannot serve directly.

Kenya Airways: One Profitable Year Inside Thirteen Years of Losses

A 2025 Xinhua report has it that Kenya Airways operates from a genuinely useful East African hub at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. For one year, that hub looked like the foundation of a turnaround. The airline posted a net profit of KSh5.4 billion, about $41.7 million, for the 2024 financial year, its first profit in 11 years. 

According to Finance in Africa, that recovery did not hold. Full-year 2025 results, released in March 2026, showed revenue fell 14% to $1.25 billion and a net loss of $132.7 million, driven largely by an 18% cut in available seat capacity after several Boeing 787 Dreamliners were grounded due to engine and maintenance issues. The same results showed Kenya Airways recording net losses in 13 of the past 16 years, with cumulative losses since 2010 surpassing $1.54 billion.

Group Managing Director Allan Kilavuka, addressing the airline’s half-year results in Nairobi, Kenya, described the position plainly: “We are doing everything possible to come back to profitability as soon as possible”, Kilavuka told CNBC Africa. That candour explains why Kenya Airways remains a credible regional choice rather than a continental one. Its connections within East Africa, Nairobi to Kigali, Entebbe, and Dar es Salaam, among them, work well. Its reach into West Africa is thinner: the only nonstop route between Kenya and Nigeria is its own Nairobi-Lagos service, with no Nigerian carrier flying the route in return.

Air France: Built to Fly Africans to Paris, Not Between African Cities

Air France approaches Africa from the opposite direction. As part of the Air France-KLM Group, which posted record full-year 2025 revenue of €33 billion and a net profit of €1.7 billion, Air France’s standalone passenger business generated €20.2 billion in revenue with an operating margin of 6.7%. 

Those figures describe a premium European long-haul carrier in good financial health, not an African connectivity specialist. The airline’s 2025 African strategy made that distinction explicit: rather than opening new African gateways, Air France chose to deepen existing markets in South Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Congo, extending its seasonal Cape Town-Paris route and adding frequencies to Zanzibar and Kilimanjaro.

That consolidation has a limit. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Air France-KLM’s revenue from African points of sale fell 16% as connecting traffic from Africa toward the United States weakened, according to an Aviator Aero 2025 earnings summary.   The figure confirms what the route map already shows: Africa serves Air France as a feeder market into Paris and onward to the Americas, not as a network of cities the airline connects. A passenger flying from Lagos to Nairobi on Air France routes through Charles de Gaulle Airport, adding roughly a full day of travel that a direct Ethiopian Airlines service avoids. The airline’s June 2026 launch of its ultra-premium La Première cabin on the Paris-Abidjan route reinforces the point: the investment targets diaspora and business travellers moving between Africa and France, not travellers moving across Africa.

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Connectivity Compared: The Best Airline for Connecting Through Africa, Route by Route

Laid side by side, the three airlines serve three different jobs. Ethiopian Airlines, with its 61-plus African destinations and government-backed balance sheet, is built to move passengers between African cities, Accra to Kigali, Lagos to Dar es Salaam, Lusaka to Cairo, through a single connection at Addis Ababa. Kenya Airways does the same job on a regional scale in East Africa. Still, its capacity constraints and a history of losses in 13 of the past 16 years make it a less dependable long-term bet for network planners and frequent travellers alike. Air France does not compete in this category at all; it competes for the Europe-Africa leg, where its premium cabins, frequency, and Paris connections to the rest of the world make it genuinely strong.

The travellers who benefit most from this distinction are the ones tourism boards, freight forwarders, and regional trade associations rely on to move across borders: the businesspeople, students, and diaspora visitors whose itineraries shift as fares and frequencies change. When Ethiopian added Yabelo and new domestic feeder routes within Ethiopia this year, it was not chasing tourists; it was widening the catchment area feeding its African and intercontinental network. That is what a connecting hub does today: it turns secondary cities into paying customers for long-haul seats they could never fill on their own. For a traveller asking which airline to book for a multi-country African itinerary, the honest answer is Ethiopian Airlines first, Kenya Airways for East African legs specifically, and Air France only for the Paris segment of the journey.

Fleet age and on-time performance only slightly complicate that ranking. Kenya Airways reported a Net Promoter Score of 28 and an on-time performance of 73% in its 2025 results. These modest figures reflect an airline managing a partially grounded fleet rather than a poorly run one. Air France, by contrast, is investing in premiumisation rather than punctuality as its main lever, with premium cabins now generating 36% of group revenue, up from 26.9% the year before. 

Ethiopian’s advantage holds regardless: a passenger choosing between a slightly late direct flight and an on-time service via a third continent will usually take the direct option, and Ethiopian is the only one of the three offering that choice on most African city pairs.

THE RCA POSITION

What African Airlines Must Do to Compete With Global Peers

The structural problem that one of the three airlines can fix alone is regulatory in nature. The Single African Air Transport Market, the African Union initiative meant to open the continent’s skies, had 38 signatory countries by 2025, yet full implementation is still projected to increase intra-African passenger traffic by 51% and cut average airfares by 26% once it actually happens. IATA has separately estimated that opening just 12 key African aviation markets could create 155,000 jobs and add $1.3 billion in annual GDP to those economies. Sixteen years after the Yamoussoukro Decision and eight years after SAATM’s launch, those numbers remain forecasts rather than results.

African carriers are also paying more to fly than their global competitors. Insurance and capital costs run 6% to 10% above what airlines pay elsewhere, a gap that keeps margins thin even on routes with strong demand. Meanwhile, the market these airlines are competing over is expanding faster than almost any other region in the world: Africa welcomed an estimated 81.3 million international visitors in 2025, up 8% from 75.4 million in 2024, making it the fastest-growing tourism region globally that year.

Closing that gap between tourism demand and airline capacity requires three specific moves rather than vague ambition. African governments need to ratify and enforce SAATM rather than sign it and stall, since liberalisation is what actually produces the fare cuts and traffic growth IATA has forecast since 2014.

African carriers need partnerships that extend their reach without the capital cost of new aircraft, on the model of Ethiopian’s 2025 joint venture with Etihad Airways, which gave Etihad’s customers access to more than 55 African destinations through Addis Ababa while giving Ethiopian’s own passengers reach into Asia and the Middle East through Abu Dhabi. And airlines need to treat the inbound tourism surge as a route-planning input, scheduling new capacity toward the safari, cultural, and coastal markets, driving that 8% growth rather than waiting for demand data to catch up with fleet decisions already made.

Whichever airline gets that sequencing right first will decide who is actually connecting Africa a decade from now, not just who is flying through it.

What This Means for Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sectors

Connectivity and tourism go hand in hand, and the numbers above explain why. With Africa’s international arrivals climbing to roughly 81.3 million in 2025 and SAATM’s full implementation still projected to lift intra-African passenger traffic by 51%, every percentage point of improved connectivity translates fairly directly into longer, more valuable multi-country itineraries. A visitor who can fly Lagos to Accra to Nairobi to Cape Town on a single regional carrier, rather than routing each leg back through Europe or the Gulf, spends more nights, more money, and more time in African cities rather than in transit lounges.

For Nigeria specifically, the stakes sit on both sides of the ledger. A tourist arriving in Lagos who wants to continue to East or Southern Africa currently has little reason to treat Lagos as a stopover rather than a final destination, because onward connections run through Addis Ababa, Nairobi, or back through Paris and Dubai. Closing that gap through the direct corridors Air Tanzania permits would let Nigeria capture a larger share of regional tourism spending, rather than losing transit visitors to whichever hub controls the connection. Nigeria’s tourism strategy and its aviation strategy are, in practice, the same conversation.

Africa’s airline map is being redrawn one hub, one fleet order, and one bilateral agreement at a time, and the carriers leading today will not necessarily be the ones leading a decade from now. For the fuller picture of what poor intra-African connectivity actually costs the continent’s tourism economy, read RCA’s companion investigation, “Africa Air Connectivity 2026: Missing Routes, High Flight Costs, and the $Billions Lost in Tourism Revenue.”

 

FAQs

1. Which airline offers the best connections within Africa?

Ethiopian Airlines, because its hub at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport reaches more than 61 African destinations, more than any other carrier on the continent.

2. Why isn’t Air France a good choice for travelling between African cities?

Air France’s African routes connect mainly to Paris rather than to each other. Hence, a journey between two African cities on Air France typically involves routing through Charles de Gaulle Airport, adding significant travel time.

3. Is Kenya Airways reliable for connecting through Africa?

It works well for East African routes through its Nairobi hub. Still, a net loss of $132.7 million in 2025 and a long history of financial instability raise questions about the consistency of the long-term route outside that region.

4. What is the Single African Air Transport Market, and why does it matter for these airlines?

SAATM is an African Union initiative to liberalise air travel across the continent. Full implementation is projected to increase intra-African passenger traffic by 51% and cut airfares by 26%, which would intensify competition with Ethiopian Airlines’ current dominance.

5. How do these three airlines compare when flying to or through Nigeria?

Ethiopian Airlines and Air France both operate direct flights to Lagos. At the same time, Kenya Airways’ only Nigerian connection is its nonstop Nairobi-Lagos service, with no Nigerian carrier currently operating the route in return.